FAIRFAX, Va. U.S. Air Force officials selected General Dynamics Information Technology for a sole-source contract to deliver Cloud Hosted Enterprise Services (CHES). The contract is valued at $9 million.

The CHES environment is being developed to support the delivery of Microsoft Office 365 services and provides the ability for the Air Force to consume additional cloud service offerings in the future, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle, SAP, and others. The CHES contract was originally awarded to NES Associates LLC, a subsidiary of CSRA. CSRA was acquired by General Dynamics on April 3.

The contract directs General Dynamics to implement CHES at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, and up to two additional Air Force locations. The contract also includes operations and maintenance support for 18 months. This will allow General Dynamics to continue its ongoing rollout of CHES in support of Microsoft Office 365 services.

Senior Vice President Ken Deutsch, head of General Dynamics Information Technology’s Defense Division says, “This contract will serve as a springboard for hybrid cloud solutions and provide our DoD customers with more options as they navigate their journey to the cloud.”

Prior to CHES, the company supported the Air Force and Defense Logistics Agency’s (DLA) cloud engineering efforts for the Collaboration Pathfinder program. The company’s engineers developed a global hybrid-cloud networking, computing and storage architecture capable of meeting all customer requirements.

The Air Force and DLA are the first Department of Defense (DoD) organizations to consume Microsoft’s Office 365 and Azure, which were the first DoD FedRAMP Impact Level 5 cloud service offerings made available for DoD consumption. As a result, the company worked closely with Microsoft and DISA to design this environment from the ground up.

By leveraging these commercial cloud services, the Air Force can boost productivity, cut costs, and increase collaboration, General Dynamic officials say.